Can You Really Unlock Your Iphone?

By David Choate

To put it succinctly, jailbreaking an iPhone refers to unlocking the phone with special jailbreak software, and thus freeing it from any restrictions that Apple has put on the device.

The iPhone is a good product. But it’s far from perfect. As a result, millions of iPhone owners have looked to the best jailbreak software to unlock their phone so that they can then improve the iOS. The iPhone suffers from a severe lack of customizability, lack of privacy, and more. When you jailbreak, though, you can fix these problems and many others with apps, patches, and plugins available in the Cydia marketplace.

Cydia and Installer are what are referred to as “package managers”. This is really just a fancy way of saying that they are a repository for 3rd party, unofficial apps.

The differences between Cydia and the App Store are the lack of an app approval process, and the lack of access limits on the iPhone software – i.e. you can do things Apple did not design the iPhone software to do.

Why Unlock (Jailbreak) the iPhone?

1)No restrictions. Want a custom wallpaper on your home screen? Custom icons for your apps? Internet tethering? A category system for organizing your apps? The ability to hide native iPhone apps you don’t use? As one of my readers recently noted, Jailbreak can make all your iPhone wishes come true.

Second – To join the community! Apple has a fascist hold on their iPhones. I should say, YOUR iPhones, because YOU paid money for the device. When you get involved with jailbreaking, you’ll find a vibrant community of end users out there.

Third – Unlock and untether, baby! Jailbreaking is the process of cracking the phone so that you can run 3rd party apps on it. After you jailbreak, you’ve then got the option of “unlocking” the phone. This means that you can use it on other providers. Apple currently tries to tie you to AT&T.

Are There Any Drawbacks to Unlocking the iPhone?

First – Apple Corp. is good at what it does. For the most part, when they’ve disabled functions on the iPhone, it’s because those functions are not ready for prime time. For instance, once you jailbreak, you can enable multitasking. Apple disabled this for a good reason – it’s a huge drain on the battery. So if you don’t want to worry about stuff like that, just leave your phone as it is.

2)Jailbreak could (maybe?) brick your iPhone.

Third – You can’t update your phone with new releases of iTunes. New releases might have cool new features, but they also contain patches that will “un-jailbreak” your phone.

4)Jailbreak voids your iPhone warranty. If your iPhone is bricked because of Jailbreak, or if your iPhone has another problem and it happens to be Jailbreaked, your warranty becomes void. I once saw a sign at the Genius bar of The Falls, Miami Apple Store that warned customers not to Jailbreak iPhones or they would void their warranties. Harsh.

Interested in jailbreaking your iPhaboute? Be sure you look at the author’s totally awesome free report about the best jailbreak software, and his blog with instructiabouts for manually using jailbreak software.

Article kindly provided by UberArticles.com

Topics: Software | Comments Off

Tags: electronics, gadgets, hacking, iphone, jailbreak, jailbreak software, mobile phones, Software, technology

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